Savage Skies

Would a game with Ozzy Osbourne have been good? No idea, but he could have helped.

Savage Skies, if nothing else, will go down in history as that game that was going to have Ozzy Osbourne in it. iRock Entertainment's original premise was to stick the legendary metalhead on the back of a dragon and have him fly around killing things, which may very well be the greatest high concept in the history of videogames. Unfortunately, it was also one of the more expensive ones, not to mention difficult to sell to a market perplexed by the contrast ("Ozzy on a dragon? How could that be fun?") and so now we get the skies without the Ozzy.

It's an open question whether the game would have actually been good if the original concept had survived the journey to completion. If it didn't turn out to be a good game, though, it would at least have had some pretty bitchin' music in the background. Sadly, Savage Skies no longer has even a funny gimmick to carry it -- it's just very, very dull. There's an awful lot of meat to the package, a heap of levels and beasts divided up into three campaigns, but if none of it is all that much fun to look at, listen to, or play, what of it?

Gameplay As I say, for something that (subjectively) feels so thin, Savage Skies can boast a lengthy list of game features. From the start, you can pick one of three campaigns (as the "evil" kingdom, the "okay" kingdom, and the "funky mutant" kingdom), each with their own selection of flying creatures, missions, and difficulty level (it's harder to be evil than it is to be good, evidently). After a perusal of all the options available, however, it becomes evident that no matter what the window-dressing, the game isn't very much fun.

An inescapable conclusion arises soon after playing the first couple of missions, which is that every dogfight feels exactly the same. The opponent AI seems programmed to always seek your six position by flying around you on a flat plane, so every encounter boils down to a basic turning fight once you establish the distance from which you'd like to attack. This leads to a few very funny situations when the enemy creature is just a touch faster than yours, because it's possible to chase each other's tails thus forever.

Once the amusement of grasping this principle fades, however, shootouts become very, very dull. Sure, there's a lot of variety to the different creatures' attacks, but hardly any variety to their application -- stationary targets are cake to destroy, and enemy flyers aren't much different. Challenge is offered only by the volume of enemies (some missions throwing so many opponents at you as to be seemingly impossible). One could argue that, say, Ace Combat isn't much different, but AC4 had real variety to its arsenal of weapons, including sub-weapons that actually made a big difference to your strategy. For that matter, it also included the challenge of flying a proper aircraft, rather than a creature that can hover, land, stop on a dime, and otherwise has no distinctive or unusual flight characteristics.

Graphics Ace Combat also looked a whole lot nicer. Savage Skies features graphics that are very lacking in comparison to most of its PS2 competition. The effort was certainly there on the part of its artists, who modeled a whole host of different creatures and environments, but the engine makes all those creations just look cheap. The textures are in very low resolution, giving the picture a hazy, blurred quality, and none of the effects have any depth or refinement to them. Lighting is crude and poorly-integrated with the models -- explosions and weapon effects only create sharp on/off changes in the lighting of the areas around them.

Some of the creatures have some interesting death animations, collapsing into bits amid a puff of blood a la Starfighter (the blood-spatter textures on the ground below are nice as well), but the models are so unrefined that the animations of living creatures are dragged down in spite of themselves. Most special attacks employ either very low-resolution textures (it's frequently easy to make out huge individual pixels when an explosion goes off at short range) or a very simple particle system -- one color, no size variation.

Sound Dear God, I wish I were listening to some Ozzy while I was playing this. You may or may not like Ozzy, but you have to agree that his stuff is better than the same wet-noodle-limp two-measure riff playing over and over for a good minute and a half, before cycling into the next riff, which gets repeated for approximately the same length of time. This routine broken on rare occasions by the odd guitar solo, but I'm not sure it isn't an insult to the legacy of Michael Schenker to call them such.

I will give Savage Skies a few props in the sound department, however, since it features some of the most amusingly overdone voice commentary since Gauntlet. Hearing a gritty basso shout "HARDCORE!" when you grab the appropriate power-up is enough to spawn more than one chuckle, and there are some pretty entertaining sound effects in the same vain, like the wet splat sound that accompanies the death of an enemy creature. But there are obviously less expensive ways to listen to silly noises.

The Verdict

The big question to ask about Savage Skies is "what might have been?" Would this have been a better game on the PC, and/or a better game with Ozzy Osbourne? Chances are the answer is yes on both counts -- it would have looked better with a PC graphics engine, and Ozzy could have done wonders for the soundtrack.

Would it have crossed the threshold into becoming an actual good game? Harder to say. Savage Skies has a very interesting exterior and an almost completely empty core -- while there are some interesting ideas scattered around here, the experience of putting your hands on the controls and playing the game is so boring that it's nearly impossible to come up with anything interesting to say on the subject. Is that a comment on the game, my writing ability, or both? Probably both. But whether or not I'm that great a writer, I'm pretty sure that this is not a game worth owning.